1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imprinting apparatus and an imprinting method, and more particularly, to an imprinting apparatus and an imprinting method capable of preventing the movement of an imprinting mold during an imprinting process.
2. Description of the Related Art
Display devices such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), an organic light emitting display (OLED), and a plasma display panel (PDP), etc. have good display quality and a fast driving speed by individually controlling pixels arranged in a matrix form. For example, the LCD displays a desired image by controlling light transmittance of liquid crystal cells arranged in a matrix form in response to image signal information. These display devices have been widely used in several application fields due to many benefits of a thin, large panel size, low power consumption, and a low driving voltage as flat panel display devices.
The display devices generally use a thin film transistor as a switching element. Fabrication of the fine patterns in a thin film transistor and a display panel require the use of many photolithography processes. The photolithography processes include forming a layer, forming a photoresist, making a mask, exposing, developing, etching, and removing a photoresist, etc., all of which are time-consuming, expensive, and complicated.
Electron-beam, ion-beam, extreme ultraviolet, proximity X-ray, and nano-imprinting have recently been proposed for forming a fine pattern on a substrate without the use of photolithography. The nano-imprinting method forms a desired pattern by stamping the resin applied to a substrate with an imprinting mold or by making an imprinting mold having a desired pattern and then depositing a resin inside the imprinting mold.
The imprinting mold and substrate move with respect to each other so as to exactly form the desired pattern on the substrate. However, it is not easy to align the imprint mold on the substrate with respect to the resin. Further, in the imprinting process, a residual layer may remain after the pattern is formed on the substrate. While the residual layer can be removed by sufficiently raising the pressure, accurate alignment of the imprinting mold requires that the pressure be lowered. However, lowering the pressure is undesirable because residual layers are formed.